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Over the years,
whenever you saw me looking at the grassy, burlap-covered book, snug
in its own matching cardboard sleeve, you'd begin the odd story of
how you had acquired that edition of Leaves of Grass. “That
book is Walt Whitman’s reminder to me of Senator McCarthy,” you
would say.

As a young teen, age
thirteen or fourteen when I first heard your story, I disregarded the
tale and considered it strange, and frankly embarrassing, that you,
my very own dear mother, supposedly a well-educated woman and once a
librarian in a small town on the Salomonie River in Indiana, didn’t
know that Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855,
which I was fairly certain was not the McCarthy Era.

I attributed your
mistake to a flawed early interest in schmaltzy books rather than
really good literature. You confessed to me that you stayed awake
nights fretting over the fate of Elnora Comstock in Gene
Stratton-Porter's The Girl of the Limberlost Swamp. I thought
you were silly for fearing that Elnora wouldn't sell enough moths and
artifacts from the Limberlost to make a living, and when you took me
to her log home I was deeply and sincerely unimpressed. A few years
late, I realized that I was the one who was confused about your
edition of Walt Whitman's poems; you weren't saying Leaves of
Grass was written in the McCarthy Era, only that you got your
copy in the early 1950s. And I respected Ms. Porter's early
environmentalism.